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Monday, June 1, 2015

There Is an Actual Socialist Running for President

ne of the funnier things in political journalism is the fact that, every time a Democratic senator runs for president, the National Journal
-- home of Ron (Leadership!) Fournier -- concocts a survey purporting
to show that the senator in question is the "most liberal" member of the
Senate. John Kerry once was the most liberal senator. So was Barack Obama.
And the funniest thing, of course, is that, while both of those men
were running for president, Bernie Sanders, an actual Socialist, was a
member of the Senate from Vermont. Today, of course, as Sanders
announced that he would be running for president, the NJdecided to remind
Americans that, yes, being a Socialist does in fact make you pretty
damn liberal. In fact, it makes you "far left." Nice work, gang.

After all, the term "socialist" most often appears in
American political conversations as a pejorative (As in "President
Obama's socialist agenda," etc.). There's a reason for that: A majority
of Americans hold a negative view of socialism. According to a 2011 Pew poll,
60 percent of respondents indicated they viewed the term "socialism"
unfavorably. Of the terms they polled—Libertarian, capitalism, liberal,
conservative, progressive—"socialism" was by far the most negatively
received. Sanders will run a campaign to the left of Hillary Clinton,
taking hard-line positions on fighting income inequality. "This is a
rigged economy, which works for the rich and the powerful, and is not
working for ordinary Americans," Sanders told the Associated Press after announcing his candidacy. "You know, this country just does not belong to a handful of billionaires."

I suppose that if John Kerry can be the most liberal
member of a Senate that also included Bernie Sanders, then anything's
possible. What is remarkable about Sanders's platform is how
unremarkable it would sound to any run-of-the-mill Democratic politician
40 years ago, and how moderate it would have sounded to Eugene V. Debs,
the last major Socialist candidate for president.

"The challenges facing our country are enormous. It's not
just that, for 40 years, the middle class has been disappearing. It's
that 99 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent, and the
grotesque level of wealth and income inequality today is worse than at
any time since the late 1920s. The people at the top are grabbing all
the new wealth and income for themselves, and the rest of America is
being squeezed and left behind. The disastrous decision of the Supreme
Court in the Citizens United case and in other related decisions is
undermining the very foundations of American democracy, as billionaires
rig the system by using their Super PACS to buy politicians and
elections. And the peril of global climate change, with catastrophic
consequences, is the central challenge of our times and our planet. The
middle class in America is at a tipping point. It will not last another
generation if we don't boldly change course now."

Lyndon Johnson could have said that. John Kennedy
could have said that. Certainly, it's milder than FDR's attacks on the
"malefactors of great wealth." In 1912, while running for president in a
superheated four-way campaign, Debs accepted the nomination of the
Socialist party with a thwacking acceptance speech that makes what Sanders is saying sound like it was written by Evan Bayh.

The world's workers have always been and still are the
world's slaves. They have borne all the burdens of the race and built
all the monuments along the track of civilization; they have produced
all the world's wealth and supported all the world's governments. They
have conquered all things but their own freedom. They are still the
subject class in every nation on earth and the chief function of every
government is to keep them at the mercy of their masters. The workers in
the mills and factories, in the mines and on the farms and railways
never had a party of their own until the Socialist party was organized.
They divided their votes between the parties of their masters. They did
not realize that they were using their ballots to forge their own
fetters.

That, as the kidz say, is the real shiz-nit right there.

What is Bernie Sanders asking of the country as he
begins his presidential campaign? A fairer economic system pried loose
from the people who nearly wrecked it all four years ago. Legitimately
progressive taxation. That the country acknowledge, with its money, that
we all need bridges and roads and water systems. Honest elections.
Recognition that environmental crises are national crises.

A long time ago, I met a guy named Frank P. Zeidler.
He was a Socialist and once he was the mayor of Milwaukee, the last
Socialist to be elected mayor of a major American city. (Milwaukee
elected three of them, as Alice Cooper once informed
Wayne Campbell.) Zeidler won his first election, as Milwaukee County
Surveyor, on the Progressive Party line, as a Bull Moose liberal. Once, I
heard him say that, when he was coming up, what made you a Socialist
was the fact that you believed your city should fix potholes and that it
should have a fire department. As Bernie Sanders begins his run for
president in an era in which people scream "Socialist!" as a kind of
conjuring word to make moderate reforms vanish, it's probably important
to remember that being a Socialist once meant that you shouldn't have to
put out your own fires. That's Bernie Sanders's campaign -- he's the
last Bull Moose in the forest.

Comments

But, he's still
running as a Democrat. That very fact, means that a lot of "purists"
will refuse to vote for him (even in the primary), because the
Democratic Party is "inherently evil", and no candidate who could
possibly win (e.g. by taking himself seriously enough to actually run in
a competitive primary, of a major party) is worthy of their vote.If
Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, because of people like me
trying to promote him as much as possible, then, he won't be worthy of
their vote in the national election, because he's already proven himself
too popular. It gives them a greater sense of self-satisfaction to sit out the election, or vote for a candidate few people will ever even pay attention to.A
vote for Bernie Sanders would be just "too conventional" to pad their
egos. Anybody could have voted for him. In fact, given the fact that
he's running as a Democrat, SO MANY people might vote for him, that he
just might be our next president!"WHAT A SELL OUT!"-----------Feel free to pile on the negatives.

Bernie queried running as an Independent but had to consider states like California who only look at the top 2 finishers.Call
him a sellout if you want, it matters not to people like me who look at
a person's values, voting history and common sense. I don't bother with purist fashion voters.

Bernie Sanders
recognizes that for him to win and/or influence the process, he MUST
have a chance to debate in the primaries. In order to do so, he must be
either declared as a Democrat or a Republican. I have NO doubt that he
would have preferred to run as an Independent. It's not a "sell out",
it's reality.

Exactly. Sanders is
playing to win. The people who refuse to involve themselves in the dirty
business of primary political competition from within the Democratic
Party, don't really want to win. They just want to claim moral
superiority from the sidelines.This is why I fully support Sanders.

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